LONG JOYSTICK CABLE
5 messages in this thread
Does anyone know what effect a long cable (100') would have on joystick
operation? And how one would go about curing it? Any help on this would be
appreciated.
Jon
That's not a cable, it's an antenna. 🙂
Well, it works, most of the time, but I get spurious results. I measured
the resistance. A normal cable is about .5 ohms. 100' is about 3 ohms.
Do you know if it's the resistance that makes the difference, or something
else?
Jon
All an Amiga joystick is, is micro switches. At 100' you might be able to
get by. The best thing to do is to tet it out. If the machine is missing
signals, it means that the resistance of the leads is such that the machine
thinks the contacts are always open. To correct it there would be only one
real cure, and that would be to build a sort of repeater. (Which would be
a lot of work.) Essentially you would have to have a power supply to feed
through the joy stick, and then use either relays close to the computer, or
a transisitor switching araingement to simutlate closed contacts. You
would need one for each switch in the joystick.
Try the 100 foot cable first.
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– Well Whap! Me Silly….
Alex, Thanx for replying. I have tried the 100' cable, and it works OK.
There's another problem, though, that seems to be aggravated by the long
cable. I'm not actually, using a joystick, but rather 5 independent
buttons. I want to be able to read the state of all the buttons at any
time. The "legal" routines don't allow this, so you have to read the
registers. Problem is to read LEFT, you check Bit #1. To read UP, you EOR
Bit#1 with Bit#9. If the result is true.. stick is up. Trouble is, if
Bit#9 is FALSE, and Bit#1 is TRUE, this condittion could mean that either
UP, or LEFT, or both are pressed. Using a joystick, it happens at random,
more on some computers than others. Using the 100' cable makes it happen
more often. "IT" refers to the fact that sometimes, at random, when you hit
the LEFT joystick, the computer says the UP has been hit. Any ideas? (I've
tried this on different machines, with different joysticks. The frequency
of occurrence varies). Oh, and if I reverse the order of the program
statements, so that I check UP, before checking LEFT, the computer tells me
(sometimes) that BOTH UP and LEFT are being pressed. Incidently, the same
thing happens, though less frequently, with DOWN & RIGHT. Different bits
are involved, but the principle is the same. Any help would be
appreciated, this has been confounding me for quite a while now :^(
Jon